Humans gestate in the womb for about nine months. Some elephants need more than two years to be born. But robots—they take years, even decades, to incubate, generating headlines about their bright, busy futures while toiling away at repetitive, diagnostic tasks in labs they'll never actually leave. Don't feel sad for the machines—pity the humans, forced to make do with semi-autonomous vacuum cleaners and mincing toys, while the robot revolution is deferred for another year. There might be excellent reasons to keep promising bots, namely the declining but still astonishing cost of advanced robotics. And yet, billions evaporate into defense, space and other budgets every year. If we stop worrying about money, and start investing in a fully robot-assisted civilization, which systems would be first on the list for immediate deployment? Here are our five candidates.

Unmanned Air Mail

Mmist SnowGoose Bravo

With all due respect to truckers, cargo pilots and other professional haulers, transporting goods across vast distances is looking more and more like a waste of our species' time, opposable thumbs and easily bored brains. Even in hazardous or inaccessible environments, such as regions whose transportation infrastructure has been crippled by poverty, natural disaster or warring factions, robots can safely go where no one in his or her right mind ever should, delivering relatively small payloads of medicine or other critical supplies where they're needed most. Researchers in South Africa are currently testing a tiny unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) called the e-Juba (from the Zulu word for pigeon), but even bigger and better bots are in the works.

Winnipeg, Canada–based Mmist's latest UAV, the SnowGoose Bravo, can autonomously take off, travel at altitudes of up to 18,000 feet, and land itself in a flat area (with roughly 50 meters in diameter of clearance), while carrying up to 600 pounds of cargo. In a pinch, the gyrocopter doesn't even have to land—each of its six, bomb-bay-style cargo compartments can open up in midair, dispensing 100-pound packages as the drone flies past. Hauling tons of cargo might still be a job for wheeled vehicles (see the TerraMax, below), but a UAV that can get 600 pounds just about anywhere with little to no human intervention could play a crucial role in almost any humanitarian mission. The SnowGoose Bravo—which essentially adds a rotor to the currently deployed SnowGoose UAV—was developed with funding from the Pentagon, but has yet to be fielded.